Throughout recorded history, cultures and civilizations have utilized rituals and ceremonies to commemorate the loss of a loved one or a member of the community. These ceremonies can be extremely large and ornate, such as for individuals with a high public profile or high political office, or they can be simple and reserved ceremonies. The rituals and ceremonies serve a variety of needs. One of those needs is to provide a means of closure for the surviving members of the community and to aid the living in coping with the loss of someone dear to them.
In many instances, a family will choose to be interned in a common plot or location for eternity. For example, a family plot may contain burial spaces for a husband and wife, their parents or grandparents, their brothers and/or sisters, their children and their spouses and so forth depending upon the circumstances and desires of the deceased. Familial plots are common and serve both to remember the deceased as well and recognizing those that have gone before them. It also provides a sense that the deceased in still with family. In many instances, the deceased has chosen to be embalmed and interned in a coffin in the ground. In other instances, the deceased has chosen to be cremated. Cremation has gained in popularity mainly because it is less costly and consumes less land space. For those electing cremation, there are many options as to what can be done with their cremated remains. Some elect to have their remains scattered over some specified location, either on earth or in space. Others elect to have their remains placed in a suitable urn, which can either be kept by the deceased's family or placed in an above ground communal columbarium or in a familial columbarium, either above or below ground. Many prefer a familial columbarium over a communal one for the sense of history and family is represents.
Interning cremated remains in a communal columbarium over conventional whole-body casket burials is attractive to cemetery owners, mostly due to the reduced space requirements which frees up available space for future burials. A familial columbarium, while requiring less space than a casket burial can still consume more space than a communal columbarium as the urns are typically placed side by side in a horizontal position. In addition, when a newly deceased individual's remains are added to the familial plot, it may necessary to open the familial columbarium to place the new urn in the columbarium thereby providing access to the prior interned urns.
Presently, when urns of recently deceased individuals are placed within a familial plot where a coffin has previously been interned, it is standard practice to place the urn in a spot next to the previously interned coffin along with an additional headstone commemorating the recently deceased's particulars. In other embodiments, the headstone may have been provided at the initial coffin burial to allow for the recently deceased's particulars to be recorded on the existing headstone.
Given that many cemeteries have already reached full capacity, or are coming close to being at full capacity, a need exists to provide a means to utilize the existing cemetery space to allow for the internment of additional family or group members without the addition of land to do so.
In order to make more efficient use of cemetery space is desirable therefore to have a columbarium that can store a plurality of cremated remains in a more space efficient manner to better utilize the limited supply of cemetery land while assuring that there is no access to prior interned cremated remains.